From: http://www.sonymusic.com/artists/FrankSinatra/mann.html
Interviews with Dave Mann and Matt Dennis
The Best Of The Columbia Years 1943-1952
Columbia/Legacy C4K 64681
Throughout the years, many writers have provided us with their impressions of Frank Sinatra as a working artist. In this pair of short recollections culled from recent interviews, two of Sinatra's collaborators have the rare opportunity to speak of their work with The Voice.
DAVE MANN
Dave Mann is best known as the author of dozens of standard popular songs, such as "There I've Said It Again," and "No Moon At All." He also wrote several songs recorded by Frank Sinatra, including "I Went Down To Virginia" for Columbia and "In The Wee Small Hours (Of The Morning)," widely recognized as one of the singer's signature songs in his Capitol ballad epoch. Mann was also a featured musician on many Sinatra Columbia recordings-- most notably, the rendition of "I Fall In Love Too Easily" from 'Anchor's aweigh' that is heard on this collection.
I met Frank Sinatra early on-- in 1939, when he was singing with Harry James. I had a real good buddy in that band named Jack Palmer, a trumpet player. And Frank was the vocalist. And that's when I met Sinatra, because I used to go around to see Jackie.
An old friend of mine, the tenor saxophone player Hank Ross, was the contractor for Columbia. I was doing a lot of studio work then, and also working with Ray Bloch's office. Arrangers were in short supply, and we were writing arrangements for about 15 or 20 radio shows per week! There were a lot of vocal groups, including Norman Luboff and Jeff Alexander, both of whom did later work with Sinatra at Columbia. It was during this time that I began working with Sinatra and Axel Stordahl.
As a vocalist, Sinatra was marvelous! There was nobody around that could sing like that. He was head and shoulders above Jack Leonard, the guy he replaced with Dorsey (in 1940).
(Before Frank) you weren't allowed to project personality into a song if you were a band vocalist, you just sang it straight because that's what the leaders wanted. If there was to be any unique solo work, the leader (if he was an instrumentalist) wanted to have that privilege. Guys like Tommy Dorsey and Artie Shaw wanted their instruments to be featured. They hadn't yet learned the lesson that the record can become a hit if the singer does a great job on it. Sinatra changed all that, as did Bea Wayne, who was with Larry Clinton's band. She put "Reverie" and "Deep Purple" over on the strength of the vocal alone. And then later on other singers did the same thing, singers came into their own then, and the leaders were learning how important they really were.
Axel was a great guy, he was a very warm, wonderful, decent fellow. He never really bridged the gap between sideman-- or regular fellow-- and leader. Axel just didn't have it in him to be as dictatorial as a leader has to be in order to achieve results. But he did achieve them nonetheless-- because his arrangements were so good. I did almost everything in the beginning, particularly the (commercial versions of the songs from) the score of Anchors Aweigh, "I Fall In Love Too Easily," "The Charm Of You," all of those recordings. I even did "Old Man River," which looked horrible when he did it in that picture about Jerome Kern, Till the Clouds Roll By!
But there wasn't anything complicated about those dates. We had a more than competent orchestra, we had all the best guys in the city. All the finest musicians. The brass section was always like Billy Butterfield, Yank Lawson, Andy Ferretti, and Chris Griffin. Tony Motola, or somebody of that caliber, always played guitar. The string section, with guys like Raoul Poliakin, was par excellence. Axel was a very competent arranger and almost as good a conductor. Of course, you didn't have to be a conductor with much savvy to do that stuff because it was fairly simple. The records were good, and they were successful, which is more important.
I'm the one who played that lovely little piano solo on "I Fall In Love Too Easily." Axel wrote that and I busted my fingers trying to play it, because it wasn't written pianistically. You had to twist your fingers to achieve those consecutive thirds, which were in a funny key to begin with. Incidentally, there was no improvisation involved in that solo at all. It was all written out. However, there were occasions when he would leave it up to the musician to improvise. I remember the other side of "I Fall In Love Too Easily" was a song called "The Charm Of You" in which Bernie Kaufmann, the flutist, played some extemporaneous passages. Axel liked 'em and said keep it in. Axel was not the kind of guy who would put himself above the overall achievement of the proper result. He was not that proud a guy, he was very considerate in the first place. I don't think I ever heard him raise his voice. He was a very nice placid easy going fella.
Axel's arrangements were enormous! Because prior to Axel, arrangers never wrote for a vocalist. They wrote for a band and the vocalist was just incidental to that. They never really took particular pains to establish a setting for the voice or to really feature the voice in an advantageous way. Axel was the first one to do that, at least in my memory of it anyway. I can remember, going way back, that even people that wrote exclusively for vocalists without a band did that. But Axel's arrangements were beautiful for the voice, they really set the voice up as a featured instrument. The voice was paramount, and everything else became subsidiary to the voice.
Frank was very ambitious. Once he became successful, he could be arrogant. He's entitled to be! I remember one vignette that was so funny: Benny Barton (Sinatra's partner in music publishing) had a music firm in the Brill Building, 1619 Broadway on the 8th or 9th floor, I think facing south on the corner of the building. When you looked out the window you could see all of Times Square and everything. Frank had just his first hit, I forget what the hell it was. And he stood in front of that window and he said, "It's mine, all mine!"-- right into the panorama of Times Square. Frank is...well, he's Frank!
© 1995 Sony Music Entertainment Inc.
MATT DENNIS
Legendary composer Matt Dennis has had at least six tunes recorded by Frank Sinatra through the years, including such classics as "Let's Get Away From It All", "Violets For Your Furs" and "Everything Happens To Me," written with Tom Adair. This collection features a true rarity-- a 1947 recording of their beautiful tune "The Night We Called It A Day" that was not known to exist in the Columbia archive until just two years ago.
I had known Jo Stafford, and her sisters, before she joined the Pied Pipers. When Tommy Dorsey opened the Palladium in December of 1940, I went down to see them. The group was really starting to become well known then-- The Pied Pipers, and Frank Sinatra, you know. Tommy asked me to play a couple of my songs, and I played some that I had just written. He said "They're wonderful! How would you like to write for me? We'll record them." I said "That's fine," and I began writing songs for Tommy and the band.
Tom Adair was working for the power company out here, just answering phones. But he was writing poems for The Saturday Evening Post, which many people don't know. One night, he came into a club where I was playing piano, and said "I'd like to write a song with you." Then he showed me the lyric to "Will You Still Be Mine"-- a hell of a lyric-- and that kind of thrilled me. Next thing we wrote was "Let's Get Away From It All"-- over the phone! "Everything Happens To Me", which Frank introduced with Dorsey, came a few days later. It was a hell of a week!
The title "The Night We Called It A Day" came about one day in late January of 1941, when Tom Adair and I were freshly with Dorsey. I picked up the paper one day, and read Walter Winchell's column. Someone had mentioned to him that someone had said that a great title for a song would be "The Night We Called It A Day", and it hit me immediately! Tom was in the next room-- we were in the RCA building, where Tommy Dorsey had a few small offices. I went in to Tom, and said "Here's a wonderful title-- give me a sample lyric on the start of the song and I'll work on it right away." We wrote the song in less than an hour and a half-- the whole thing, right there in the office. That's the way these things happen, though.
An interesting thing that not many people know about the song: the original construction of the song in the first eight measures had different chords than the last eight measures. I purposely saved a certain chord that had a minor sound to it, for the line "Like a minor lament...," in the second eight measures. That line gave me the chance to use a very provocative chord at that point in the song. Unfortunately, at the time, most arrangers would pick up the typical song, and except for the turnaround into the release (the bridge), they would copy the same chords from the first eight measures.
Now in several of my songs I used different chords, to keep it interesting musically. I would made a slight change here or there, to keep the song fresh, so it wouldn't become too repetitious. Problem was, when a lot of arrangers copied "The Night We Called It A Day," they would copy it with the wrong chord! Very few maintained the original, minor chord. The minor chord was used twice-- in the second eight, and in the ending.
The minor chord had two purposes: it fit the lyric in the second eight measures of the song, and in the last eight measures, as the song was coming to a close, it gave it a tearful, sad feeling. The line that reads "There wasn't a thing left to say...the night we called it a day" is where the chord should change to minor. I thought it was a really appropriate to lead into the final line.
Even Axel didn't get it right, but that was okay! It's a beautiful arrangement. The mood was fantastic! When I wrote the song, I used a couple of chords that were classical in sound, in the middle part, where it resolves melodically and harmonically. It was a "touch" where you hit a chord, and it resolved immediately to another chord. It was an effect in the actual song, and Axel used that-- it gave a dynamic feel to the song; it was an emotional riser-- and that was very important to me whenever anyone sang the song. When Frank sang it, and those chords happened behind him, that was part of the emotion! I was thrilled when ax made arrangement, it is gorgeous-- the definitive arrangement of that song.
Originally, I wrote the vocal arrangement for Frank and the Pied Pipers-- they were supposed to record the song with Tommy and the band. But then Frank was having some problems with Tommy, and he wanted to leave the band. I was delighted when he chose to record the song on his first solo session, the one for Bluebird, in 1942.
I had never heard the unreleased version of "The Night We Called It A Day" from 1947, until Columbia included it on their Complete Sinatra studio sessions (in 1993). I thought it was great! How could I not like it? Sinatra had such a natural sound to his voice. I think his renditions of my songs are just fantastic-- he knew my style, and sang them much the same way that I'd sing them. How could there be anyone to make me sound better?
Interviews conducted and edited By Will Friedwald and Charles Granata
© 1995 Sony Music Entertainment Inc.